Straight Outta The Lair with Flex Lewis
7x Mr. Olympia 212 Champion Flex Lewis presents Straight Outta The Lair, the podcast that aims to bring you vital information for your life's ambitions, providing valuable insight from interviews of the many many different faces that walk through our doors at The Dragon's Lair Las Vegas and a few from the man himself.
Straight Outta The Lair with Flex Lewis
Voice & Victory | Rene Rodriguez | Straight Outta The Lair Podcast Ep. 84
Embarking on the transformative odyssey of public speaking, I found myself in the company of the illustrious speaking coach, Rene Rodriguez. Together, we peel back the layers of keynote mastery, comparing its demands to the rigorous discipline of bodybuilding. Rene imparts her wisdom on the importance of being genuine and self-assured when sharing your ideas, and we discuss the impact of true presence across various professional spheres. This episode promises a voyage through the art of storytelling and the relentless pursuit of personal growth, as we share tales of metamorphosis and resilience that resonate well beyond the stage.
Conquering the stage is akin to conquering oneself; this episode delves into that journey. From the intrigue of Aristotle's ethos, pathos, and logos to the battleground of overcoming social anxiety, our conversation meanders through the challenges and triumphs of becoming a compelling speaker. As I lay bare my own transformation, from overcoming obesity to embracing leadership, we explore how the potent blend of narrative and neuroscience can dismantle the barriers of anxiety and self-doubt, connecting us more deeply with our listeners and our purpose.
As we wrap up, we touch on the importance of mentors and masterminds in honing one's craft, with a special nod to mental toughness coach Ben Newman, who joins us in spirit. We also acknowledge the tech-savvy era's demand for creating impact on social media and share strategies to foster psychological safety in any environment. Finally, we pay homage to the iconic orators who've shaped history, leaving listeners with a sense of empowerment to craft their legacies—one speech, one breath, one connection at a time.
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----- Content -----
00:00:00 - Intro
00:09:40 - Understanding Influence and Finding Purpose
00:21:04 - Relentlessness and Transformation in Keynote Speaking
00:28:26 - Overcoming Social Anxiety and Finding Purpose
00:36:19 - Creating Lasting Change and Psychological Safety
00:40:50 - Stress's Impact on Brain and Safety
00:45:16 - Embracing Social Media for Success
00:57:44 - Overcoming Anxiety Through Breathing Techniques
01:04:36 - Breathing Techniques and Building Trust
01:17:28 - Different Styles of Public Sp
What is your lane? What I'm doing is proven by stay out of those lanes, and I stay in mine.
Speaker 2:Straight out the lead. Join today by somebody who's become a friend, part of the farm, renowned as a speaker coach in the industry, World's best by many Renee Rodriguez. We are going to talk about why you are here on Straight Out the Lead and also get into the details of how you and I connected. You are now my coach and we've been working now together. For how long we've been working together now?
Speaker 1:For some months. Right, it feels like years, but it's been months.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I put a stress on a lot of people, unfortunately, yeah you had a hair when we first met too. That's the stress I brought into your life.
Speaker 1:That's as far as I'm going to go back.
Speaker 2:yes, no but we have certainly connected and hit it off, thanks to. You've got to pop this off from the top of the show. The muscle Keaton.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:Him and I. Obviously we've got a fantastic relationship and I've seen this guy my gosh just hit the highest of highs now with all his speaking and how he's transformed in this world too. But it's all down to you, somebody that he regards as his backbone and getting to the level as he's out right now. And when I was at Keaton's house and seeing his transformation, he kept on mentioning this name, this person, and then I had the introduction and Keaton was like flex, this is going to be your coach. You need to work with one another and, as I said, we hit it off with a bang. And here we are today and it's an honor to have you here. You've flown all the way from Minnesota to have a couple of days with myself locked in. The door Whiteboard there is being smashed with all new information. So for me to you, thank you so much. I know we're going to get into the details. It's great to have you on the show.
Speaker 1:It's an honor to be here, my friend it truly is and go back to Keaton Keaton was already an incredible, powerful human and an amazing speaker and being able to get him some some of the different techniques and getting him to tap into who he was and a lot of ways, just reminding him of what I already knew he believed.
Speaker 2:So that and I think that's what a lot of this is about, and the same thing that we're doing with you.
Speaker 1:I'm looking forward to it as an honor and being here at the layer is really cool.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you were definitely not only being transforming others, but you've had a major transformation yourself and I want to talk about that later on in the show. But you and I have been really getting into the depth of Keynote speaking and it's such a fascinating and scary world. It reminds me so much of bodybuilding. I know I've mentioned this on the show a few times, but it's the closest thing to being up on that bodybuilding stage for me, because in preparation again, if you've not done the unseen, you're going to look like an absolute fool up on stage, right, just like bodybuilding.
Speaker 2:So it's all about and I can I cliche this now reps and sets and I've been to now three of your masterminds. I've been again a student, I've also spoken and for anybody who hasn't attended one of your mastermind, who is interested in getting into speaking, what would this mastermind entail? Because I can say from my perspective and I will, but you set these masterminds up after 30 years of being in this world and you perfected this craft and I want to get into, obviously, them details as well. But a mastermind for a student, what does that entail? If somebody's watching this, they're once again into public speaking, keynote speaking.
Speaker 1:I think that we have our mastermind, which would be our one and a half day event where we're bringing together some of the, I think, some of the coolest minds, you being one of them Clinton Sparks to Neil Ford and LaShawn Merritt, three-time gold medalists and amazing people to come together to really share ideas. But amplify is the course that we went through.
Speaker 1:That you went through to really hone in on the skill set. And what you said is true, like speaking, why I think you relate so well to it and why it's like bodybuilding is a bodybuilding. You're going on stage and Speedos for some, in an entire audience, millions of people, in your case to judge you and you will be exposed if you didn't eat right, if you cheated, if you didn't do the right things, physically and aesthetically, keynote speaking is the same thing, except you'll be exposed for your ideas, for your thoughts, for your beliefs, for your identity, for who you are. It's a reason why it's so feared because you are being put on a stage for people to judge whether your idea makes sense, whether your delivery is engaging, whether you're boring whether you're somebody that has something that's thought provoking or it's cliche.
Speaker 1:It's such a crowded space that it's harder than people think, but yet it's also more attainable than people realize.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and for the audience that are listening, it's not just big stages, right? A lot of the people that were there were in various different genres of business real estate, banking, mortgages. They're all trying to hone in their craft to speak better in front of small crowds to bigger crowds. Some people have their own coaching groups, but they're all hired you to perfect that craft. And what I've learned by sitting back as a student from day one to day three so many dramatic improvements even on myself, because when I'm sitting there and listening and seeing you change people's verbiage, posture and there's so much, like you said, that goes into this, the confidence that grows from everybody. Also, you create an environment that, regardless of who is in that room Olympia, mr Olympia, is to Olympic medallist, to somebody that is maybe the best real estate agent in the Southeast, whatever it would be To a 17 year old, to a 17 year old there's you drop all the egos. You have such a skill that again, obviously people have spoken about this, probably even you and I meet them, but you have this skill to make sure that there's a safe room and I didn't know what I was walking into on my first amplify, but soon enough I felt very comfy in that room where I didn't have to try to be somebody, I could just be myself and be a student.
Speaker 2:And of course, yes, I obviously spoke and told my story. But even while I was telling my story, and after the fact then the whole class, then none of the sense grades you. But how can you improve that story? As long as you've dropped our ego and you're willing to receive that critical change, that's the only way you grow and you've created that safe space and an environment where people truly want to see the best of one another.
Speaker 2:And I've already made friends from the first that I've now got to see in the second, the third and now I have opportunities to speak on other stages. And again, it's just how you have this gift to see the best version of people, whether it's somebody who's petrified, generally just speaking, or somebody who's spoken on over a hundred stages. Just to cite a side story, one of the gentlemen I mentioned just now was spoken on over a hundred stories, over a hundred stages. Even he was having these aha moments and it was incredible for me because, again, I've spoken on multiple stages. So, no, I'm moving into new chapters which, again, I want to talk about, but was this a gift you've always had?
Speaker 1:No, it's one. Thank you for everything you're saying. That means a lot and it's.
Speaker 1:I think I'm good at it because I was never good at it and it was something that was very hard for me to do A lot of social anxiety, insecurity, not being somebody that knew how to use words. As a kid, I didn't know how to talk back, so I was always fighting and so, learning how to actually communicate an idea and not being somebody that was the talented one, you had to learn what were the things that the charismatic kids, the ones that people listened to, what was it that they did differently? And I would just watch and you realize that there's a pattern to it and then you realize there's a science to it. So, when my backdrop or background in behavioral neuroscience was really focused on how do I create and understand the process of change?
Speaker 2:Because all we're talking about is change right.
Speaker 1:Changing of behavior, change how you speak, change how you sound, how you communicate, the sequence and everything. But the biggest piece was realizing that it's speaking is one outlet of what we actually talk about, because really, what we're talking about is not speaking, it's influence, and influence happens silently, it happens when you speak, it happens when you walk, it happens how you dress, it happens to the sequence of how you say things, and a lot of people focus on getting comfortable on stage, and what I tell them is that your comfort on stage has nothing to do with your effectiveness on stage, because we know a lot of people that are very comfortable being very boring on stage, or very comfortable being very egotistical on stage, and so the comfort isn't the goal. I know people that are extremely uncomfortable, moving me to tears, moving me to life change, and they're trembling and all of the quote, unquote things that they shouldn't be doing. They're doing, but yet I'm being affected, and so what we want is to get people to realize that your goal is influence, and that applies one on one, and so a stage, to me, isn't just a stage. We're on a stage right now. There's no real stage, but there's people watching when you walk from your car to the front door of a potential client. They might be watching you. That's a stage. And so there's a stage every phone call, face-to-face interaction. Those are all stages.
Speaker 1:And when you realize that you're being watched and observed, whether you like it or not, it's happening unconsciously, implicitly, explicitly. People are watching and they're making judgments. That's what the human system is designed, and so we look at okay, how do we set the chess pieces up in play to best suit what we're trying to accomplish? And so a lot of people will say that's manipulation. Okay, let's talk about that for a minute. It's a big difference between influence and manipulation.
Speaker 1:Manipulation is very specific. From what I've, in my research, found Very specific definition. One of them is that it's the use of persuasion and influence to an extreme, so that an extreme use of it second at the expense of someone else. So there's a zero-sum game I win, you lose. And third, it's done underhandedly. You don't know what's happening.
Speaker 1:Influence to me is done, where we both win. We're driving towards something that is a solution that I believe will serve you, versus one that will hurt you and can be done explicitly. I can tell you that I want to persuade you in this I would like. I'm very passionate about this. I believe very heavily in this. So I'm telling you I believe in something, and so the differences and people that say that it's unethical. Every human, since we were born, is designed to want to influence the world around them. Children learn puppy-dog eyes because they know it's very influential. Women are highly influential when they want to be. Men can be highly influential, and so we realize that influence has such a deeper impact on our life, and so the best way to understand it probably is to think of the opposite.
Speaker 1:So imagine walking into a room and no one noticing Telling a joke, no one laughing. Sharing an idea, no one caring. Selling a product and no one buying. Casting a vision, no one following. How would you feel? Not great, it would be horrible, right. Some people would say invisible, lonely. I think the word I use is insignificant.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:That I have no impact. So I am insignificant. I can speak, nothing happens. I don't speak, nothing happens. And so my participation in this activity. If I felt that way in a meeting, I'd be why am I? I asked myself, why am I in this meeting? If I felt that way in a relationship, probably asked myself why am I in this relationship? If I felt that way at work, I'd be like why do I work here? Sadly, too many people walk around feeling that way in life and they start asking why am I even here? But that question of why am I here begs the question of what's my purpose. Let's bring influence back.
Speaker 1:You walk in a room, people notice. You tell the joke, people laugh. You share an idea, people love it. Sell a product people are buying. You cast a vision and you watch people mobilize and take action. How are you feeling now?
Speaker 1:Oh, top of the world. Top of the world, right, and I think that's a great way of saying it, because I think that having influence is one of the greatest of human experiences. Not having it is one of the worst. And so when we look at it from that perspective, we're looking at influence being that mark that we make on the world. It's where we know our purposes because we go okay, I'm in a meeting and I have, and I feel significant, I know why I'm here. I'm here to move this to there. If I'm in a relationship and I feel valuable and visible and significant, I know why I'm here. If I feel that way at work, I know why I work here. If I walk around going, hey, I can influence this world around me, I know why I'm here. And so to influence and purpose are so closely connected in my opinion. And so when you're getting on a stage, if you wanna take the stage, the work begins way before the content. The work begins with what you and I did out there saying who is Flex, what is the ethos of you, what is that thing that you do so effortlessly in that when you're outside of that ethos, it just feels awkward, it feels uncomfortable, and so many people right now are finding themselves in that position.
Speaker 1:For social media, they're trying to follow a trend. What if that trend has nothing to do with what you're skilled at? And it's like for me being outside of what I'm good at. It's like me saying I'm gonna do a class in the menstrual cycle. I mean, why would you do that? You shouldn't be doing that. Or how to grow hair I wouldn't do that. I wouldn't do one. On how to grow abs, I'd do it. I'd take your class. It's finding that thing that you do effortlessly and really honing in on that, and then all of a sudden, you build content around it. You're extremely authentic because it's congruent with who you are and what you're saying. And so now, all of a sudden, you're more comfortable in that stage environment and you know that lane that you're in For somebody who's watching this and saying, man, that's me and they're recognizing it through this podcast.
Speaker 2:What would be the first steps?
Speaker 1:In terms of finding your influence and really Finding your congruency to your brand, to your person. So I take a very different approach to it, and so when I use the word ethos, it comes from Aristotle. 2000 years ago he was the first person to talk about argumentative thought and persuasion, and he created what he calls his rhetorical triangle, the three-legged stool. It's ethos, pathos and logos, so don't get too caught up in the name. It's actually in my book too, so like if you want to look at it, you can Google it.
Speaker 1:I'll provide you, your influence.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And so ethos is your credibility, it's your character, it's who you are. So we've been talking about ethos Like for me it's neuroscience, and I spoke 239 days last year, so I have an ethos and a credibility in speaking. I'm not a speaker that used to speak, I'm speaking all the time and so what I'm doing is proven, and so I don't have ethos around growing hair. I don't have ethos on the menstrual cycle, so I stay out of those lanes and I stay in mine. So one is figuring out what is your lane? What is that thing that you know, that you do well? And some people say I'm brand new and I don't have anything.
Speaker 1:We all have a lane, and that lane, even if you're new, might be that you hustle. It might be that you bring a fresh perspective. It might be that you're resourceful. What is that thing that you do really well? You might be a fast learner, you might be somebody that just outworks everybody. I will do what you say when you say, with no questions asked. Those are all ethos things. So figuring out what it is, but now how you find it, I take a different approach. I ask the question of what makes you unique, and you and I went through this in the course.
Speaker 1:You guys done it, yeah, and so one of those pieces, let's go, let's play it. You want to?
Speaker 2:do it right now. Let's go.
Speaker 1:So give me, if the first word, and if you're listening to this, you can do this exercise and you can do this multiple times. What's? Give me one word that makes you unique Relentlessness, Relentlessness. Ok, so now we take this word. And what's really fascinating, when people answer that question of what makes you unique, you can infer all sorts of things. One is you're proud of that, aren't you Absolutely so. If you're proud of that, I can also say would you say that's one of your core values?
Speaker 2:Core values In terms of my day to day.
Speaker 1:One of your core values are things you hold dear to you, that you are relentless, absolutely.
Speaker 1:I feel I am relentless in everything I do, right, and so then we go OK, we just trace that back. We go. One, he's proud of it. Two, it's something that represents you and it's one of your values. When I get to the values now, we bring the neuroscience in. This is where it gets fun. We know that our core values, our values of who we are actually a biological process that's formulated between the ages of 9 and 13. So if you go relentless that's not something that you said last week I decided I'd become relentless. So you've been that way basically your whole life, haven't you?
Speaker 2:Absolutely.
Speaker 1:And so we go OK.
Speaker 1:If that core value was formulated in that really critical time period. I have two really critical questions. I want to know who's around and what happened. So let's start with that. And now that'll trigger one of two types of stories Either a lighthouse story, what we call a lighthouse Somebody was the beacon of light for relentlessness, and you wanted to be just like them and you saw them. They were the guide, they were the perfect example. They were a lighthouse. What most of us have are Foghorns, the opposite, somebody who wasn't relentless. And so we saw what life was like not being relentless. We saw the pain of it. Maybe we needed some relentlessness from them and they didn't show it, and so we suffered. And it's fascinating about the Foghorn is that when we have those in our lives, most of us actually say, wow, I had darkness in this area of my life. I need to become the light and we become what we never had. And so for you, who was it? Ages 9 to 13?
Speaker 2:And were they a?
Speaker 1:lighthouse or a Foghorn.
Speaker 2:Yeah, oh, you're asking me right now. Yeah, we done that. First of all, we've done this in class, just for every year Did we go with relentlessness? We went with driven loyalty. My goodness, I haven't got my notes in my book, but I don't think we did relentlessness.
Speaker 1:That's why I think it's fun. Let's keep it yeah.
Speaker 2:Relentless there was.
Speaker 1:Who's the first person? And here's the best part is that it doesn't have to be the exact or the one yes, anything.
Speaker 2:And also just to Foghorn, is necessarily a bad thing. Not at all. It again. It's somebody that just was at the lighthouse or a Foghorn in that part of your life. And my father was relentless. He was again turn up at work, sick. He would be walking to work rain or shine Again. Never missed a training session, even if he worked 12 hour shifts. He was always there at my game, put the coach's hat on. He would go without sleep just to make sure that he ticked the box of work, brought bread to the table and then you obviously was there as a dad, but as a kid and this is where we went into this you don't really appreciate that much. You see, our dad is there. You know he worked, but now, as I'm older and I understand as a father myself that word relentless is my father.
Speaker 1:I love that. And so now look at that. What's happening is he was there for you. You're observing this. Your brain is going okay, there's a narrative here. There's a story. Dads always show up. They don't miss games. They work hard, they don't make excuses. Even if he's sick, he still goes in. That's how the brain processes all that. It turns it into a story. So our brain processes information through narrative. It turns that narrative into a way that you construct and view the world. Another way of saying that is the way you perceive the world. Another way of saying that is how you construct reality. And so you now are saying I watched this. He was a lighthouse for me.
Speaker 1:It's a core value, and a core value becomes a filter by which you make decisions. And so now we go okay, as you approach something and it becomes difficult, your core value kicks in, happens in this part of the brain called the limbic system that has 35,000 times more neurons, so it is the most powerful. When I say quantity of neurons moving towards something happens in the limbic system. If you don't believe me, okay, try to talk somebody out of their church. Doesn't work. Have a political conversation with somebody who doesn't believe what you believe. Talk to somebody who's an Android user, get them to use Apple. It's all limbic right. It's all in that same part of the brain that our values are there, and so when you can trigger into that, you go okay, I'm relentless, this was there.
Speaker 1:Look at how that's followed you through this whole career of becoming rugby player, deciding to come to a country that you didn't know anyone, and then became one of the greatest, if not the greatest, bodybuilder of all time. And so now you're in this transition and you're saying, when we first I'm a bodybuilder, you're so much more than that. You have the epitome of a champion, the mindset of a champion, and what I? One of the things that I was told you was like I look at it like a football huddle. There's certain things that most people don't get access to. There's 11 players on that field per team. What would I give to be able to just sit there in the huddle and listen to Tom Brady talk to his team? Not many people get that. That's what people want from you. And so when you talk about relentlessness, it's a whole different animal than when someone else does who hasn't been Mr Olympia seven consecutive times.
Speaker 1:And when you talk about unseen work like. One of my favorite things you said was put your damn phone down and let's see what you really do that nobody sees. We can all pose for a picture. We can pretend to read a book. How many reps and sets did you actually do? How far did you actually with no one watching?
Speaker 1:There's that relentless nature that you come from, and when they hear that from you, all of a sudden, now that is part of your ethos. You can talk about that all day long and it is effortless for you. It is, and it's so much more believable because we see it, so it's congruent, which is what our audience is always looking for. Unconsciously, they're saying is this congruent, meaning I'm watching you like?
Speaker 1:For me, part of what my transformation was is that I was way overweight and being 307 pounds, 45% body fat, talking about change in leadership where I clearly can't even manage myself, I was losing ethos credibility and so I had to look at now, even my content was good. I got a pass, but that pass was running out, and so when we talk about if you're listening to this, he can talk about relentlessness because it comes in. Imagine him starting with his father going back to. I remember watching my father and that story becomes interesting and we get a chance to know who you are and then transitioning. Any business community, any business leader, would love to talk to you about that, because they want relentlessness for their teams.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's just learning how to tell your story that connects with the audience. And what you've been able to do working with me is, again, I've lived these stories from my own eyes, right, so many stories where I've been brushed off. I may have said something to you like tell me that story, tell me that, and then it's become something. But because again it's in me and I've lived it and it may be what I feel like or not, something that may not be much, it is. It's a massive part of my DNA. It's a massive part of a hoodler I've gone through and what I've started doing, and for all the viewers at home listening to this, I've got a notes that I've started compiling in my phone and every time I have a moment when I was like, oh yeah, I put that note in my phone and then I start deriving a story from that.
Speaker 2:And what I've been able to do since working with Renee is really tap into a lot of these suppressed memories, a lot of these things that I may have buried deep, put in the Pandora's box, and I've been able to now start thinking about wow, that would make an impact, that would be able to be spoken about in a room and maybe change a perception of something Again. Another reason why I wanted to get into keynote speaking was I know I have a great story, I know I have a journey, but that was a chapter and now I'm onto newer chapters. And for the, let's be honest, for the last 20 years, my whole life has been all encompassing one goal, one dream, one chase to be the best in the world. And now, humbly, I have to start pretty much from the beginning. I'm not at the beginning anymore because I've been working with you.
Speaker 1:You're not at the beginning. Even without me, you'll be great.
Speaker 2:I'm not without you, so you can't know what I mean, but nonetheless, I've had to truly go back to the classroom. I've had to but that's who you are.
Speaker 1:Yeah, always been a student.
Speaker 2:And I, just like you said, I regard myself as a student of the game in bodybuilding, always learning. You train with multiple different people around the world, even if they're 20 years. You're junior, you're still learning, and I've been able to progress in my career tremendously by having an open mind, not knowing I know it all, even with titles, and, unto seven, I've always allowed myself to be a coachable person. Obviously, I've had the same coach since I was 19 years old, neil Hill, and I work really well in that system. So when I wanted to get into this new world and become a good speaker, to become a great speaker, you've got to have, in my eyes, the best coach, and I now realize why you're regarded as one of the world's best is because, truly, you've been able to see the best version of me and really bring that out. And we've got a long way to go because, again, even the best in the world have still got a long way to go.
Speaker 2:It's the beauty of life, but I've been able to see and listen and even envision myself on these stages. And as I said in bodybuilding, if you don't believe you can achieve something, then you're not going to achieve it at all. I truly believe that I will be speaking on big stages very soon, but again I've got to put the work in.
Speaker 1:One of my good friends, seth Madison. He says the breakout rooms lead to the ballrooms and it's such an important mentality to have that it's people. Somebody was saying I went to an event. There's probably 3,000 people there and they're like thank you so much for speaking here. I said thank me, I said thank you, I go. You know how silly I look on that stage without you guys in the audience? And it's. And then he goes. Oh, that's a good point. I said this is teamwork, man. I go, you're giving me the opportunity I need to bring value and if one of us don't doesn't do that part, it just doesn't work. And so there's a beauty in understanding that relationship with the audience and that you're on that stage to serve because they have choice of attention and we can put anybody on that stage. We can put anybody. We, especially in today's where we have options of information everywhere in social media week with a thumb scroll, we can just do this. And so being going up there from a place of okay.
Speaker 1:I am. This is a privilege, and I am here to express everything that I've learned. And if I don't put the work in, like our buddy LaShawn Merritt says, you will get exposed, and so there's a beautiful connection there when you can keep that humility, but also power, with that and understanding your role.
Speaker 2:There's a story that I seen a couple of months ago that you sent me, of a Renee Rodriguez in a meeting, a business meeting, and he was stammering and stuttering through this meeting. And it's very hard for me to see that guy and be like, wow, you know, that was you. You truly have worked so hard to get to this point. But again, you started off knowing that you had a gift. You just had to home the craft. And can you take us back to that video you showed me? I know it was a couple of years ago, but nonetheless yeah, we will, but it was a version of you that has truly put so many reps and sets in.
Speaker 2:A lot of people may be watching this is yeah, but just to sorry. More context yeah, but he speaks so well. I don't have that gift, but now did you know you truly work so hard to home this into something that has become a teaching lesson for the world. Can you talk us back about them that time?
Speaker 1:Yeah. So I had massive still do actually social anxiety, like I don't like groups and I don't it's funny because people say, but you speak in public. I said, yeah, go, but the stage is a very lonely place.
Speaker 3:And.
Speaker 1:I get to control what's going on. So there's it's. I get to talk about what I'm good at, and so there's a lot of safety in that. It's ironic, but it's way it is. But, yeah, a lot of massive insecurity, didn't? I was a mumbler, so it was very hard to understand me. And that video was my first speaker training where I was getting coached and I was on stage and hair, and it was a lot of ums and Oz and questioning, staring at the floor, not knowing where I was going, massive stress.
Speaker 1:It was the way most of us are on that, and to me, my relentlessness started way back in realizing that I wasn't the smartest, but what I had was work ethic. I knew that I could control that. I couldn't control all the other things, but I can control how hard I worked and if I got up a little bit earlier, I went a little bit harder, I studied a little bit longer, and a part of it, too, is probably not even having a father, and so I would always be coachable from my friends parents, because I was, I wanted someone to teach. Even if I knew what they were talking about, I pretend like I didn't. So I could have that relationship and even to this day, there's times where you know, even though I might think I know, like what if I don't? And there's like a there's a really beautiful interaction that can happen with that. But yeah, it was part of it was I was forced to do that we had.
Speaker 1:I was following my mother's footsteps. She had been a consultant, she was an amazing speaker still one of the greatest speakers I've ever seen and she, after 9-11, lost a million dollar contract. I was working at the company. I was just a sales coordinator and we had to fire 20 people. I actually at the time sorry, I had just become CEO and wasn't a speaker and was not. It was too young, too inexperienced, even though I'd been following for five years, everything she'd been saying and writing notes and everything Didn't have any belief in this was possible. It was also told by everybody in the company nobody can do this but your mother. There's nobody that can do this. Renee, I've got 40 years experience. Your mother's special she can't. She just nobody can do this. So in my head I'm thinking, okay, nobody can do this, the pressure, but yeah, but I would. They didn't even want me speaking. But now we fired everybody. So it was me and my mother, a bookkeeper and one other person. And so I'm like, okay, I know how to sell because I was selling was my background and I sold cookware door to door in college. So I'm going to go sell her.
Speaker 1:And because of the loss of the business she has, she had four strokes. It was like it was the stress that was her baby. My mother was a former nun. To give you an idea, a little backdrop she was somebody who's about global peace and community but was very gifted in creating change, and so this beautiful company she'd created was gone. Now Stress came in. She had four strokes, her ideas weren't the same, she wasn't as sharp as she used to be. So I would have to introduce her to the group.
Speaker 1:I would go, put a group together and then she would talk about things that didn't make sense to them, because she'd assumed that they knew about the brain and all that stuff. And so I'm like, okay, I'll do the intro and I'll cover this first for 10 minutes or five minutes I think the first one was five minutes and then she would speak, and then she talked about new things. I'm like, oh, I'll incorporate that in the intro. And now it's nine minutes and then she talked about new things and it was 15 minutes 20 and I'm doing 45 minute intros and people are like why don't you just keep going?
Speaker 1:And it was one of those things where it just started. I had to learn. And then I went and got trained on storytelling and what influence really was the guy? My coach was trained by Dave Pemberton, who is the person who taught Tony Robbins, and so in that realm of some of the great sort of the OG speakers, we were all there's a way that we all spoke and I can tell them, like the Les Browns and Zig Ziglers and Tom Hopkins and Wayne Dyer there's there's this whole era of the original Nightingale Conant speakers and there was always a methodology to it, and so I got a chance to learn that. And then I took my behavioral neuroscience background and combine that with a sales background and working in change management and it started devolving into this process of me figuring it out for myself first and then being asked, okay, can you show me how you do that? And then evolving into it.
Speaker 1:How long that process take. That video was 2005. 2005. I started in 19,. I started this whole. 1994 is when I really started and in selling cookware and being in personal development and learning about all the brainworks and putting it into practice. And then but I wasn't really speaking until 2004 or five, and then my big, first big stage was 2007. That was me, Jeffrey Gittimer, Ben Stein member from Ferris Bueller's Day Off and Luke Holtz, and I came out of that number one rated speaker there.
Speaker 2:Wow, when did you feel like okay, this is my world.
Speaker 1:How would you define my world?
Speaker 2:Meaning bodybuilding was my world when I first stepped on stage. And sorry to give you more clarity, but when I first stepped on stage I was like, wow, I've got the bodybuilding bug. Obviously, had it not been for Neil Hill chasing me down straight away after the show and saying, hey, you need to do the British nationals who knows what happened, but we all know the story Was it a defining moment for you where you had that? This is my world?
Speaker 1:17 years old I was. My mom asked me to come watch her speak. And it was that she was doing a creativity and business workshop. She was. There's three keynote speakers, it's probably about 500 people in there.
Speaker 1:And I remember going there, go with my mom I don't even know what she does and this guy's first guy goes on stage. His name is Bill Shepard and he was charismatic. He was funny, he was smart, I loved what he was talking about and it was like and I was like, oh my God, I said I nudge my mom, I'm like that's what I want to do. I want to do what this guy's doing, whatever he's done, he was funny, he was so articulate, he was so confident. People were listening. It was. He had everything that I didn't have. He knew how to capture attention. People liked that. It was just literally everything that I didn't know how to do and that I didn't. I couldn't, I had no influence. I was a jock. So I played basketball but I was quiet and insecure. And this guy had everything. And she looked at me she goes, really, she goes. Well, I'm up next. I'm like oh man, you're going to follow this guy. My mom, you're going to get destroyed. Like I was, like I was embarrassed, I didn't want to be there.
Speaker 2:At this point you didn't know.
Speaker 1:your mom spoke at the magnitude she had no idea, no clue, and it was a break. I go out and get like a soda or something like that. I come back and I came in 30 seconds and I hear her singing and I'm like, oh my God, she put on a guitar. How embarrassing is this? And she's got 500 business executives singing along with her. Now, my mother was a nun on the border of Haiti, harassed by the Ku Klux Klan, the KGB, and she used to use music as a way to bring people together and she brought her to the boardroom and they're singing and I'm looking around going. They're buying into this shit.
Speaker 1:And then I'm like they're loving this. And then she sits down and they start talking and she starts. I get emotional because she was so good and she was so clear and it was like almost magic. And I'm watching this and I'm 17. And I just like I start getting teary, I crying, not visibly. I'm like this is my mom. An hour earlier I figured out that's what I wanted to do and I have the best person as my mom.
Speaker 1:And it was in that moment I'm like I know I have to go this path somehow and you followed her around everywhere. I wrote down everything she said. We talked about everything she said five years.
Speaker 2:And you developed your own style through your background, incorporate your school in to the world of, obviously, keynote speaking and your mom obviously during that time you had so many great speaking, as you mentioned, but she had such a unique style Very what separately did her from the rest of the park.
Speaker 1:One of it was based on things that actually worked. So a lot of keynote speakers are great actors, they're performance experts and they nail that speech. And it's so compelling, it's believable, it's emotional, it's inspiring, it just it's fulfilling. But the whole statement is that it wears off. A couple hours later, if not the next day, you go back to normal. So there's no real change.
Speaker 1:Mother was lived in five countries before the age of 25, germany before the, cuba before and after the Cuban revolution, germany after the Holocaust, panama during the Panama-Kinau crisis, the border of Haiti as a nun, with a real warfare in Vegas during the A-bomb testing. And so her life before 25 was very affected by change, the promise of it and the reality of it. The promise was revolution. The reality was a lot of people died. Looking at leveled cities in Germany after the war and saying so, she was driven by all these questions like how can we create change that lasts Truly lasts, not this stuff that comes and it goes.
Speaker 1:Secondly, how do you do it without creating dead bodies? Right, the proverbial dead body, because people aren't dying in corporate America, but people can feel like they've been trampled over. The change happens Like they weren't even considered people losing jobs, moving around, and that's why change was such a difficult and still continues to be such a difficult thing. There was all these questions that drove her, and she had a track record of success for creating change where nobody could. And so when a keynote speaker can come in for an hour, put on a fantastic show and leave and not be held accountable to the result, when you're a consultant and you're given a group of people that have to transform. You're held accountable to the beginning and to the end and the result, and so there's a very different world, and when you can combine those two pieces, which is what I started off doing that work before I was a keynote speaker, so I was 10 years plus into creating change in real business.
Speaker 1:It wasn't theoretical. Nobody paid for theory. This group was hostile, they weren't getting along. They're losing $6 million a month. We changed that. Unions weren't getting along. We could change that in 24 hours and it was true, it was proven. And then you bring those ideas to stage and then you have a neuroscience twist and my background is really focused on the applied science. I love the research, but I was always too like what does that have to? How do I use that to sell more? How do I use that in good communication? What does that mean to this? And I would ask these questions that were applied, application driven. And so when you bring that to the stage, before it was cool, because now it's cool About 30 years ago, like the brain, human emotion wasn't even talked about. My dissertation in college was on human emotion. It was so hard to find any research because we knew so little. And now it's everything. Probably too much now.
Speaker 2:Hold another conversation Along with aliens.
Speaker 1:I'll go there, but no, but I spent most of my time getting grown men, typically, to understand how to deal with human emotion, how to bring it to the workplace. Now it's almost opposite. We're trying to say, okay, just a little bit too much, let's back it off a little bit. But yeah, it's a crazy long journey.
Speaker 2:Can you talk about what kind of things you've done back then to bring the best version out to some of these guys?
Speaker 1:So the first thing, when you're talking about group change, what you amplify as an individual journey but we had a lot of what we started with was how do you take groups to do that? The first thing is what you mentioned in the intro is how do I create safe space? So what does that mean? What we're creating technically is what we call psychological safety. And so go back to the primitive parts of our brain that's designed to keep us alive. Number one task of the brain survive. Second is make sense of the world. So if I can't make sense of the world, if I don't feel safe because I don't even care about sense logic, I care about my survival. So when you get in an argument with somebody, there's a part of your brain that takes over, that throws logic out the window, and so it's the same thing that keeps us alive, protects us. So then you look at what triggers that part of the brain. That part of the brain is very primitive and ancient and it's triggered by lions, tigers, bears, sharks, threats, somebody fighting you, the fear of your life, and so that that's governed by the autonomic nervous system your breathing, your heart rate, your digestion, so, if anything is any of those things that keep you alive or threatened. There's a whole chain link of events that happens to trigger you, to put you in a fight, flight or freeze mode. All of that happens, some up to seven seconds, before you're consciously aware of it. It's the reason, like we were having this conversation, but if somebody were to throw a ball at me I would flinch and try to move Because there's part of my brain that's watching all of this stuff. As you and I are having this conversation. It's pretty wild when you think about how many parts of the brain are functioning unconsciously and, thank God, right, because it keeps us alive. And so now, what triggers a lot of that fight, flight, freeze mode or the general adaptation syndrome is stress. So the brain doesn't know what a shark is. The brain knows that the shark is really stressful. A lot of cortisol to the level of maybe, say, one to 10, 10 because death. So the brain says that's a level 10 stress. Move away from that, fight for your life, fight for your life or stand still. And so we go.
Speaker 1:Okay, so stress is the component. What are the things cause stress? What? Public speaking? Now, you're not going to die, but you perceive it as a level 10 stress, so you respond as if you're going to die.
Speaker 1:And criticism If you don't. If you feel like you're in a meeting and people are criticizing what you're saying, they don't care what you're doing, your brain won't be fully active. You'll be in that protective mode. Creativity goes out the window, so does innovation.
Speaker 1:And so, as leaders, we said okay, the first step is we got to create safety, structure, order, predictability, create safety in the relationship. Back in the day, leaders and still to this day, but it was less now leaders were command and control do as I say, because you work here. It doesn't work anymore that way. Leaders have had to evolve to say hold on a second. I need to inspire you now. Before it was you work here, I pay your bills, do what I say Doesn't work like that anymore. And so any learning environment.
Speaker 1:The first thing is psychological safety.
Speaker 1:If you're a salesperson listening to this, sales resistance is they don't feel safe. I have money, you want my money. You're going to persuade me and trick me into giving it to you. If you can create safety, guard comes down. We have a conversation and ideas are allowed in, and so we had to create safety. Now, how do you do that in a hostile work environment with unions and cake, 80% African American black paper mill, but the union is 100% white KKK, that's where we cut our teeth. And so I had to create safety within 24 hours actually eight hours, one day to the next, and usually within the first two to three hours and how do you get people to actually get along? And when you create psychological safety, racial issues go away, political challenges go away and people have human conversations and human interactions, and so we had to create that kind of environment. So when I created amplify, we knew the first thing if I'm going to be that hard on you and that intense, I have to earn that by creating rapport and safety first.
Speaker 2:How long do they take you to put this? Put all your learnings from everything you had from your mom, your background, in your assignments to create this. Create my amplify.
Speaker 1:My first one was 2011. And it's changing every time. We do it Last year, we're doing three to five a month and selling them out at $6,000 per person.
Speaker 1:And so it's. You learn so much and hearing thousands of stories and thousands and watching people tell the story, you realize what works and what doesn't work. You realize its role in branding, you realize its work on social media, you realize how it affects relationships and children and how they grow up. The impact is so much further than business which you know me well and you know me already that my purpose goes far beyond business. It's helping somebody truly understand why they're here and then helping leaders truly tap into their full potential of influence and leadership. And so it's. I feel like, when you say how long it takes, I still feel like I'm still learning, man.
Speaker 2:Yeah, even at last mastermind that we've done. There's a new topic that's come up social media Again. That's the evolution, right since when you've started, whereas a lot of people know that a thought had on social media, even with yourself, there was not a component of social media in the learning, but now you realize that this is something we cannot ignore even more. We've done a whole, probably like a half a day on social media, along with chat, GBT, intricate, intricate, getting into my life. What I realized. Obviously I have my social media presence, but we all had if I can speak about the actual event so many walks of life, so many people of high success, all in our room, egos left at the door, all there to learn. We all had to choose our bucket where we wanted to excel more at, and I guess you even thought yourself like social media was something that I think it was the most requested thing.
Speaker 2:How do I speak in front of a camera? How do I, on that course, truly give so many people empowerment? And you heard it first of all. Yeah, I don't know what to say. I don't think I've got a story, I don't, and you just break it down. It's telling me about. This goes back to the foghorn lighthouse and then people start. You see these light bulbs going off, whether it's with that person you're having the conversation, but everybody in the room is like oh man, I'm taking this note down. Social media now is our kind of roller indexes, oh, yellow pages, it's our. It's to coin our friend Amir, it's business media.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:It's our face to the world, how we want to be seen, perceived, but again without losing your ethos. And what everybody in that room realized that day me looking around was everybody has the ethos. You just don't know how to put it together, but we all did that day, even me, who've been on social media and got all these followers. I'm still trying to find my version, and that's what we done actually a couple of hours ago on my whiteboard is trying to discover who am I, who is flex Lewis, what do I stand for, what do I represent and what is my ethos. And social media is truly taken off 10 for where now everybody's got their phone in their hands to your point Every scrolling. But what makes people stop on your page? That makes you stand out from the rest of the pack. And it's incredible what we learned that day.
Speaker 1:Again, can you just break down that last year, Well, I think the thing and you said so many good things there and shout out to Amir where he said there's ways to look at social media Let me back up even my relationship with it. I hated social media and parts of me still does. Right, there's a lot of things that just it was hard. I was 12 years into trying to create videos and putting stuff out there and nobody would watch. I couldn't get past a couple of thousand followers, 20, 30, a hundred views and it was like but this content is great in my own head and my clients would say really, you're going to kill it Like nobody watches.
Speaker 1:Maybe any better production. So I go and spend $10,000 on a video 48 likes, okay, $20,000.
Speaker 2:This is the video and nobody would watch it.
Speaker 1:And I finally gave up and I go social media is not for me. And I got on this sort of high horse and I was like social media is for fast food content. It's simple sugar for the brain. It's a cliche, and I go true, change requires you to actually pay attention for longer than a minute, and so I had to sort of I hated it.
Speaker 1:And somebody said to me they said, renee, it's because you're doing it wrong. And I'm like what do you mean? I said you have to understand that you're teaching people how to speak to captive audiences. What do you mean? I said they can't scroll in a live audience. Right, I can't scroll you. I'm sitting in a chair, physically, you're there. The only thing I do is stand up and leave. But I work here, so I have to listen to you, so you can start with story you can build. If somebody goes to watch a movie, maybe a two hour movie, they're not going to give you the end right away. They're going to lead you to that. You didn't know that Rocky was going to win the championship until the final scene and that whole story was built. And so there's a methodology. It's the hero's journey, the rise and fall of the hero, and so I tried taking that same approach for social media Doesn't?
Speaker 2:work.
Speaker 1:Imagine starting up. Hi, I remember when I was a kid, when my father scroll, yeah, and you had to realize that, that we are very selfish consumers of content, and I used to get mad at people for being selfish consumers as I was scrolling, being selfish. Every time we scroll, we're saying that was dumb, nothing for me, nope, that didn't catch my attention, nothing. None of us go into social media and say what is this person with poor video and a horrible story telling skills trying to say, I mean, look past all that and really give them a chance. No, I have another option. I can just hit do this swipe thing and something new appears. And so what? We had to realize what? You had a three second audition for attention. So how do I capture attention?
Speaker 1:Now, this whole concept of the hook is not new. People are saying, oh, this is new. It's not new. This is headline writing that newspaper articles have been doing since the beginning of print. And we say how do you stop the scroll? Back then they had to stop the stroll as people stroll by the magazine articles or the newspaper stands. What made them stop and go? Oh, wait a minute, what's that? We've always been in this process of trying to capture attention. It's just new ways, and so the one thing that we also had to do was saying, okay, these are a lot of these people are very successful business people and in the didn't you find it fascinating, too when we said, okay, we had people put themselves in buckets. Are you here for growing business performance, meaning more revenue, or you want to learn social media? The people that were very good at business revenue were very poor in social media, and the people that were growing and the people that were great in social media needed help and growing revenue.
Speaker 2:It's like ying to yang.
Speaker 1:And what's funny is that you watch these people that are like they're making millions. I need to figure out social media. I'm like you, really don't, but if you did, you'd be exponential and a lot of the people that are great on social are starving behind the scenes, renting most of their lives and or they might get a bunch of views, but they don't understand the business side of it, and so merging those together is a really fascinating piece, where those that were good at business were starving and we're like we're chopping at the bit to help those in social media and those that are social media were wanting to help those. It was a beautiful mix, but now we go okay, let's work with somebody that doesn't know how to and where their place is on social. What that means is they don't know their ethos, and so what ends up?
Speaker 1:People, they watch what works for other people and they try to copy that, and it can feel very uncomfortable. It can feel very out of place, like I don't do dance videos, and so for me, I'm like. I'm like good dance, yeah, we'll see so hot in the hips.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I can dance, but I was watching these things that work for others. I'm like I'm not going to do a dance video, I'm not going to do these stupid humor things. It's just not me. I'm funny, but I mean I'm not funny. I liked laughing and joking, but that's just not. It's not my ethos and it would feel very awkward for me to do that. And so for me, I had to figure out how do I become myself and do that and so many people follow a trend.
Speaker 1:But I looked at it from saying, okay, hold on a second Instagram and TikTok. They want people to watch videos. It helps their platform. So what they're looking for is saying, hey, can you just be yourself and then we'll go find the people for you, instead of you're trying to be all these other people that other people are following and it's just not good at it. So we're not going to put anything in front of you. But if you're really good at being yourself, we'll find people. Look at the people that that ever watched. If you get caught in a doom-scrolling and you've watched somebody doing their job, there's a camera over this guy that works at a diner and he's just making eggs and hash browns and he's so fast at how he's doing it and it's just what he does and he's good and I can just sit and watch.
Speaker 2:I'm like man, how does he do?
Speaker 1:that this is a thing. I watched this guy make fried rice. It is at the same time, but he's so good at it and it's just what he does. He's not trying to give lessons, he's not trying to do dance, he's just making his craft fried rice and I love it. It's.
Speaker 1:If you just put out there what you're good at, the algorithm will find people for you. But what most of us don't know is what is our ethos? What are we good at? What is my lane that I want to occupy? So it begins with that. It's what we did with you, even just again, that next level of it.
Speaker 1:When I built my brand, I had to go out and find a copywriter to help me figure out my ethos. What did I believe? What was my thing? It's when you figure that out, that what makes a unique question, and you work it backwards to the lighthouse. That's one really fast way of figuring out what you do. And now we did it with one word. What if you did it with five? And then you go okay, you got relentless. You got a lot of analysis, focus, discipline, right. What was the other ones? We had driven and fun and jovial, some really cool things, all of topics that you could easily speak to, all topics that you could write a blog post on. We could throw it. We did it earlier. I wanted to prove it to you. I said let's just have a conversation. You're prep guy, you prepare everything. Now notes from your past podcast you had that thick of notes in cards I go, we're not going to prep anything because your last 40 years have been your prep, within your ethos.
Speaker 2:And, by the way, that's what you told me about this podcast too. You're ready. You were like, nope, we're going to go on, we're going to talk as friends, we have a lot of stuff going on. So this is all reps and sets, being comfortable in the uncomfortable, and, to your point, I'm always prepped, I've always gone notes, I'm always shuffling through my cards, and this is unique and I don't feel the stress that I normally do in another show. Granted, I have phenomenal speaking guests that is doing the show for me, but nonetheless, yeah, it's a. I think I've taken a little bit of anxiety off the table by not having to overly prepare.
Speaker 1:Think about what you've done. Your job was perfection Every muscle group, every striation, how much conditioning, what fat was there. And then strip all the clothes and we're going to analyze this on a group of professional judges that it can see everything and we're going to put you against the best in the world. So your job was to be perfect for that short window of time a few hours a day of time. But now, in social media and in public speaking, it isn't about perfection, because nobody connects to perfect. Your job wasn't to connect with the, wasn't to be connect, to connect with the audience. Your job was to look perfect.
Speaker 1:But what I think made you special was who you were off-stage you, anybody who knows you, anybody who knows your flex. You can't go anywhere without people knowing you and you stop and you give 100% of your attention to that person and you've done that your entire career and that's why you still are loved by so many. That is what I think makes you unique. But you look at, but you still approach, speaking from that. I need to be perfect. And now it's saying, okay, hold on. I'm saying what if I was? What if it's not about perfect? What if? Perfect now means authentic, full of errors, blemishes, mistakes. That's a totally different world for you. That's a whole different world for me. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And you're truly trying to I'm sorry, trying. You're telling me to embrace this. It's okay not to be perfect, and when we go back to that story of you starting off and to see where you're at right now and all the hundreds of stages you speak at every single year, it truly is something that I know need to embrace daily, and not just on the speaking stage, not just on the podcast, just being who I am off camera, when the camera is not on me, because something happens and there's a lot of viewers who probably will relate to this as soon as the camera comes on. I have to. You know how many times do we fix our shirt?
Speaker 1:You've had him raise the camera so it looks skinnier, it's. There's all these things that are going on, and but here's the thing, all the things that I'm saying are way easier said than done, yeah, and so I want to. I want to honor those that feel that fear, Because, think about it you were saying, hey, just be yourself. You know what we're saying Be yourself. And they're going what if they don't like me? That's scary. Well, I want to be likable. We all want to be likable. I want to be impressive on the show. Who wouldn't be? Who wouldn't want to be good? You don't want to go on a podcast and bomb.
Speaker 1:And so there's this natural built in pressure to impress your audience. And so part of the discipline in the training is to let go of the need to impress and focus on expressing what you believe and who you are. And you start it's scary, but if you go, okay, so then I. So, then let's dive deeper into this. Absolutely yeah. So then, how do I get to express? Well, one is, I've got to change my relationship and my frame of reference and how I view this. My job on stage isn't to impress. My job on stage is to serve. So okay, that's different mentality, there's a different mindset to that one. So if I'm there to serve, then, and then to the realization that I've been asked to do this, so they must have seen value somewhere.
Speaker 1:And so then I have to learn to not listen to that little voice. So I learned a long time. When that voice lies to me it lied to me my whole life Damn it. And if I know that it lies, I'm like hey, I know you're going to tell me I don't. And even today I'm like what do I know? Every day that's like imposter syndrome always creeps up. Everybody has it. So you're not special for having, I'm not special for having. It just happens. It's part of the human condition to question and it's an integrity. Am I qualified to do this? How many people don't have that little radar and just give advice and directions in cities? They've never been. What's that? My favorite meme that says Lord, give me the courage of the 25 year old life coach.
Speaker 2:So much confidence.
Speaker 1:So much I believe it. Somebody says, hey, I'm confident, I can do a heart surgery on you. I don't care how confident you are, Renee, You're not touching me unless you've been trained and have experience. So point being it's being yourself isn't as easy as it sounds, but it's the worthwhile journey to get on and like even today, you're like Roderick. We were like going through and we did our first thing with no prep. And hey, step one, you did five reels and you wouldn't allow them to post them. I looked at all these great. Are they what they can be? They can be so much better, but this is great. Get it out there because you can't bypass the learning curve and it's really well done. And the more reps and sets, the more comfortable you'll get. So it's one of those things that what people the unseen is, all the mistakes, all the criticism. By the way, I'm also a recovering perfectionist, Recovery recovery I'm still there.
Speaker 1:It's so stupid. And Gary Vee says something that.
Speaker 1:I hate it when I hated it when he said it and I fought it, but it makes sense, it goes. Perfection is another way of saying you're just scared and insecure. All right, you got me there, and what's interesting, though, is that the fear and the insecurity also can become a really strong driver to push to work hard. I work hard because I don't want to sound stupid. I listen and I study because I want to be able to answer this question, so there's a beauty in that as well. When it controls us is when it goes on hand.
Speaker 2:A lot of people suffer with anxiety, myself included, is probably being probably one of my biggest battles. Doubt, and more so, gets overshadowed by anxiety, many times Over-thinking, even in this case. Now, what we just spoke about. What kind of strategies could you give the viewers to overcome anxiety, just in general life, because we're not just. I want to cover like a vast base you're of. Obviously we've talked about stage and stuff, but across the board, what strategies?
Speaker 1:The first thing that helped me is understanding that stress is physical, that anxiety is physical. Now, once I know that it's physical, it's tangible, because before stress can feel that this, I don't know, this intangible thing that comes over me and I don't want to control it, stress is physical. There's a biological, physiological and neurological process that takes place, that it creates it. And let's just break it down really simply. There are two nervous systems, part of the autonomic nervous system central nervous system called the parasympathetic and the sympathetic. They're antagonistic, which means they cannot be functioning at the same time. It's either sympathetic or it's parasympathetic. They're one or the other Lights on, lights off. So sympathetic is the excitatory response, it's the stress response. You want that. When you're running from something, the fight-flight-freeze response happens in that sympathetic nervous system. The other is the parasympathetic nervous system, the relaxed response. Where we want to get to for this, we want to get to a parasympathetic place. You're comfortable. What we're looking at creating in here for your guests is the most comfortable relaxed place. So they come in and they just themselves. You can sit in the chair and they're like that's a sympathetic nervous response. So then you go okay.
Speaker 1:If my goal when I feel stressed and go okay, this is a sympathetic nervous system response. How do I trigger parasympathetic? You can't go oh, trigger it. It doesn't work that way. You have to do parasympathetic things. One of them is breathing and think about every professional athlete that we know, every actor, every elite performer, every Navy SEAL. The number one conversation I have when I get to work with them, train with them, learn with whatever it is breathing, it's biology Austin Eckler, one of the greatest running backs in the NFL right now. What do you think we talk about? He's a bit of a people, faster and stronger than me. I perform under pressure better than they do.
Speaker 1:Because he manages his biology, the stress doesn't go overboard and take over, and so breathing is that secret weapon of the high performer, the elite. Sadly, it's the punchline of the under performer. What I mean by that is you ever see somebody make a joke about breathing and meditation and mindfulness? I said at the moment they make a joke about that. I know they've never faced 3,000 eyeballs looking at them expecting them to entertain them. They've never faced a game winning shot. They've never been on a stage where everyone's going show us what you got. But you look at Kobe Bryant, lebron Jordan basketball is obviously one thing Every fighter that we know. They're not there hyping themselves up, they're there relaxed. Lashon Merritt one of the fastest men on the planet, three gold medalists he's breathing. You look at Usain Bolt before he's running, he's just relaxed. That's all very parasympathetic. And so there's this place where we go okay, how do you align your brain to work and to get into that flow? It is all biology and it is all triggered for the thing we can control, which is breathing.
Speaker 2:So breathing is something that you should really start investing into, absolutely, absolutely. And there's so much now, especially with the internet right, that you can gather so much information from, but what kind of breathing techniques would you give or would you advise somebody that just has terrible anxiety that's truly taken over their life?
Speaker 1:For sure. And what? If you want, I can put a link in the bio. There's a guided relaxation process called the progressive relaxation that we use and it's a way I'll guide you. It's a four and a half minutes and you basically tense and tighten different parts of your body.
Speaker 1:The powerful thing about progressive relaxation is that it teaches you the mind-body connection, meaning I feel stress, oh, I feel it in my shoulders, or I feel it in my jaw, I feel it in my fists, or it's in my butt, cheeks or just clenched, whatever it is. You start building that connection and then you can tense it up even further and then consciously let it go and you realize that you can actually control it. You do that three times and you can choose just one body part relax and you enter that state. So we'll put that in the show notes. The other is there's different levels to it. Navy SEALs are famous for making box breathing very famous. Four seconds in, hold four seconds. Four seconds out, hold four seconds. They do that as they're in the middle of a battle and that keeps their brain in system two, which would be the parasympathetic, while their enemies are in system one and panic. They don't function the same, they don't do that they train under stress and they do that.
Speaker 1:Box breathing takes some time and practice. My favorite way to start is diaphragmatic breathing, a very simple Mayo Clinic method of three seconds in, four seconds out. There you go Four, four right and you practice that and you really have to time that. The key is to get more seconds breathing out than you breathe in. If you breathe in, if you breathe out too fast, if you breathe in, let's say you go four in, three out, that's hyperventilation. So you want to make sure that your breath out is longer. You hold the oxygen longer. So three and four out, which you graduate like. My favorite for breathing is big, deep breath in and then seven to eight seconds out. Andrew Huberman talks a lot about two quick breaths into the nose One deep breath in through the nose and then another one at the end and then out. That's one of the quickest ways to get parasympathetic.
Speaker 2:Which we done in the last mastermind.
Speaker 1:And if you do that, you go. You feel this coolness immediately go through your body. So practice that. But the thing is, try them out and learn what works best for you. I can't do that two seconds. I'm about to go on stage. I can't go. You look stupid. But I can breathe in deeply and slowly exhale as I'm talking to somebody. I can do it on stage, I can do it as I'm being introduced, and so breathing is that thing that really helps. And here's the thing it's the last thing you want to do. When you're highly stressed, your body is running in that direction and you're trying to say let's go this direction. And so it takes practice, it takes discipline, and don't wait to your stress to start practicing. Practice now. When you're relaxed, get into that place, remind yourself that you can do this, look for the quick wins and remember that the anxiety isn't reality, even though it's so compelling in the moment it's so compelling this is going to last forever.
Speaker 1:No, it won't. Things come and things go, and can you make it through that moment? Can you be through in those moments where it feels like it's forever and it's pervasive? It's not, it's temporary, and you begin the mindset narrative to say, okay, hold on a second, I can control more of this than I realized, and, yes, it's going to be hard, and then make sure that someone around you can be there to remind you. Hey, let's breathe and be open to it.
Speaker 2:Yes, there's a couple of questions for your Renee, please.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so I've got, I've got a modern question and. I've got an ancient question. Love it, you prefer. You surprise me. Okay, all right. So you talked about congruence and being consistent and aligned, and in today's day and age, we're dealing with more and more people that don't trust the media, don't trust politicians. We just don't trust faces of authority, even though they've made their living off of being congruent. And so how do you reach a real level of congruence when even the most congruent among us are no longer trusted by society?
Speaker 1:It's a phenomenal question. So I think, if I'm, if I'm hearing you, how do I build trust in it? In a distrusting world? How do? Is that kind of what you're saying right? Especially with the media, was supposed to be our trusted source. And then I look at the channel by which we're communicating. Somebody wants to ask me so, Renee, why aren't you more vocal around politics and maybe even racist or just issues? And I say what? That whole medium is immediately a very distrusted medium and it's not a very bonding one For me. Choosing the right avenue of communication. I'll give you an example. So, george Floyd, when that happened, 15 minutes from where, I live.
Speaker 1:And everybody said Renee, why aren't you more vocal? You're Rodriguez, you should be talking about the community. And I said what do you mean? How do you know I'm not vocal? I haven't seen you post on social media. I said when was the last time you read something that was opposing to what you believed? And you go. Wow, I never thought about it that way.
Speaker 1:Social media is a very divisive process. Most people get on there, they rant and they scream and all it does is it calls people who already believe what you believe to come to your rescue and it pushes away people that don't believe what you believe, and so you did nothing. It takes no skill to do that. I go, I have been vocal, but I've been doing it one on one. I have been going to powerful executives, people that are leaders, people with budgets, people that have influence, and I've been one on one conversations, and I can't tell you probably 80 some conversations. I had that week Very emotional week for me and people saying Renee, I want to help but I don't know how, and when I try, people just bite my head off. These are white men, by the way, and one of the things I said was very controversial During that time, one of the most important voices was white men.
Speaker 1:They were like what are you talking about? I said they have influence, they can hire people, they have budgets. I go aren't you looking for allies in this moment? And I can't tell you how many people, when a white man with power would say, hey, what do we do? It's because of you guys. And it's like, oh, and then they go.
Speaker 1:Maybe I should just be quiet and listen and I'm like you realize you just bit the head off of the person that could probably help you in this moment, not saying the only one. But how about let's take a different approach? Why would you put them in a fight-flight-freeze mode? Why would you trigger that out of them? And I get it where you're angry and I get it. All that stuff's happening, but to me, maybe a one-on-one conversation might be the best one. And there was a group of my friends that wanted to get together and have a discussion and put on social media and they wanted me to lead it and I was like, no, no, thanks, and they were upset. I'm like here's the thing that, to me, isn't the most effective methodology, based on what he said, which is it's a very distrusted means, and so I had to look at what are the trusted and distrusted means and make sure that I'm not guilty by association of that. Did I answer that question?
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, I think you did. It's a hard problem too. I agree A very hard one. Yeah, great question.
Speaker 2:Tias, what was the other one?
Speaker 3:The other one's more on the ancient side of stuff.
Speaker 2:Tias loves this.
Speaker 3:On multiple occasions, you guys have brought up the Aristotelian triad, or the rhetorical triangle, or whatever you want to call it. We've talked about, if my Greek is correct, ethos, which is ethics, pathos, which is emotion, logos, which is logic, and, to a smaller extent, kairos, which is, I believe, timing. And the fifth one what?
Speaker 1:was the fifth one, telos. What is telos? Greek literal word for end, the purpose, kairos. Kairos would be the timeliness of the era.
Speaker 2:Have you read his book?
Speaker 3:Tias, I have not read his book, I just studied Greek. Oh my gosh.
Speaker 1:I'm surprised you knew kairos. Nobody knows kairos. Listen, this guy is super impressive.
Speaker 2:Yeah, tias needs to have a camera and be more present. I'm very lucky that I've got him to be on the mic.
Speaker 3:If you guys saw what I look like. I'm like a burn victim.
Speaker 2:You don't want me on the camera. Oh my gosh, what's he talking?
Speaker 3:about.
Speaker 1:So my question, the question the best looking guy in the room?
Speaker 3:Thank you. That's why we can't put a camera on me. I don't want to put you out of shame. So my question regarding that is Aristotle argued that those, the primary three, are the ones that motivate an audience, that create a compelling argument. However, he also argued that they don't work equally for each audience Agreed, and so my question is based off of the different cultures, the different demographics you might be in front of, how do you dynamically change your presentation between being ethical, emotional, logical for a dynamically changing audience?
Speaker 2:Store my question. Tias, Sorry about that.
Speaker 1:We're going to have him write all these questions. These are great.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that was my question.
Speaker 1:by the way, the reflex Tias, 100%. Right Back then, aristotle thought his favorite was Logos, logic, and he felt that was the most compelling. And you go back to, even go back to, even when cameras went around what did they say?
Speaker 1:video killed what the radio star? Yeah, what that means is that now we took a visual approach to things. It moved before. We just listened to the talent, to the voice Millie Vanilly, right, look at that piece in Shakakang. And since these singers were just incredibly talented, then video comes out, we go, oh, but Britney Spears is so much better looking at the time. And so then now the visual aesthetic started to take over.
Speaker 1:And so, back in the day, this ethos, pathos, logos, this rhetorical triangle was in a written form. And so there was how do you create an argument? And today we call the business case right. And so logic was there. But now ask ourselves, in the time we're at, how much does logic play into our decisions? And look at social media, where so much emphasis is put on the ethos people buy the rent, the fake cars, and they bought all these things. So they perceived to the visual ethos. If they can afford those cars, they must be smart. And they're drawing into aspirational appeal, which is appeals to the insecure, like, for example, six minute abs. Would you ever buy six minute abs?
Speaker 2:By seven, by not six. No, it's not going to. No, it's not going to play.
Speaker 1:Because it doesn't work that way. But if I have an insecurity about my ability to put the work in, I'm like, oh wait, hold on a second. I can do six minutes. So aspirational appeal appeals to the insecure about doing the actual work. 30 days to financial freedom you can't do it financially free in 30 days. It's a little bit longer than that and a lot more to it. And so, to answer his question, you go okay. So you look at ethos, credibility, your ethic, all of those things.
Speaker 1:So many cool things about the word ethos when you get into the word, and then pathos is the emotional appeal. So let's work all three for a minute. Doctor has ethos, right. Doctor says, hey, flex, you're getting fat and you need to lose weight. You'd probably say, okay, doc, I'll start next week, because they didn't have any pathos. Pathos is the emotional appeal which usually drives behavior. So there wasn't there. Doctors have a lot of ethos, but not much pathos. So then we go okay. So now what's logos would be the logical appeal. Think of how many logical things we know. $2 trillion budget in healthcare. 80% of that budget is made up by five behavioral issues that we all know Eating, drinking, smoking, not enough exercise and too much stress. Yet still, we do it. We don't have a logical problem, we know it. We don't. We have a behavioral issue and usually that's around pathos.
Speaker 1:And so, to answer the question, if I'm dealing with a group of engineers probably going to have to up my logic on this one and maybe not be as storytelling but if I'm training, because I work with a lot of engineers, I'm talking about MIT level, harvard, yale, some of the best engineers in the world. They're way too heavy on logic and they're losing their audience, which is why they're boring and no one's listening to them. You have some of the most brilliant minds in the world, but an idea that goes on deaf ears because they just get too technical, and so we have to up their pathos, which is probably uncomfortable for them. And so then you look at a group that is overly passionate and they lack the logos. We have to work on that piece of it. Or if I'm, let's say, I'm doing with a group of kids, I'm probably going to be focused on some of the others, and so part of the process that we teach is first, who's your audience?
Speaker 3:What if you don't know? What if you walk into the room and you have to change dynamically? Is that possible?
Speaker 1:Yes, one of the things for that and I love these questions the first step in this is listening, pay attention. So people say how did you prepare for this? I'm like, well, a lot of times I get, renee, what are you going to talk about today or tomorrow morning? I'm like I'm not sure. Yet you didn't prepare. I'm like no, no, no, no, not sure.
Speaker 1:It's because I need to listen to the audience first. If I haven't been told who they are and 80% of my work is who's my audience? What's going on? And I asked the CEO, I want to ask, I want to interview people, I want to know in depth. And if I don't, then I need to listen first before I speak, because I might. I don't know who's, what's going on, what's happening, whose role is what? What's happening? And if I just start doing that, I'm just shooting into a dark room. I'd much rather listen, figure out what's going on before I do that. Abraham Lincoln had a great quote. He said if I had eight hours to chop down a tree, I spent six sharpening my axe. That's beautiful Court. So to me it's listening and figuring that out first, asking a ton of questions and just listening.
Speaker 1:Some of the best persuasive way to be is actually just to listen.
Speaker 2:Tyus, we will be talking after the podcast, because my next question you just asked him. No, I'm the one that's like sitting here like the sidekick to you on this podcast.
Speaker 3:I didn't pass the bottom Me.
Speaker 2:You just slid in and I had adapted into different audiences which you just answered I take full blame. And then he's and he gives you the oh, these are great questions, tyus, I looked at your notes first.
Speaker 3:You shouldn't write them down and leave them on the table.
Speaker 2:I couldn't have cards to them, fortunately, but but yeah. I know, I know, but, but you speak. How many stages you speak at last year?
Speaker 1:I looked at days. Days was 239. Oh my God, but a lot of those days were sometimes not a lot Several many of those days were five and six events.
Speaker 2:So adapting to different audiences could be back to back. Oh yeah, Could be week to week.
Speaker 1:Yeah, day to day.
Speaker 2:Day to day Out of the row.
Speaker 1:Sometimes I'm talking to a group of salespeople that I might be the next hour I'm talking to a group of engineers, and then I might be talking to a women's group, and then I might be talking to you know, three CEOs, or a room full of 600 CEOs. Totally different For a lot of people.
Speaker 3:The message sorry to just cut in. It's my show now, let's do it. If, for a lot of people that are really successful, they say the same message over and over again and they've just figured out the great way to compartmentalize that, does that mean that you have the same message with a bunch of different ways of presenting that message? Or are you creating different speeches for every single audience? So what?
Speaker 1:I think you're referring to is there's a lot of. Some of the best speakers in the world have a product. It's like a movie, right, and their speech is the same every time you hear it and it's perfect. The good ones, it's great. Ed Mylady you watch his talk. He's got the same cadence. It's down on his knees, talks about his dad and you and I don't care how many times you watch it, it is just as compelling. If you watch your favorite movie, you're listening to your favorite song.
Speaker 2:Oh, but he is.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and what's great, you know what to expect. It's predictable, it's a brand right, and so that's the keynote sort of perspective. Here's my keynote. And if you're at his level, you can buy that for several hundred thousand dollars. And people buy it all the time because they know what they're getting.
Speaker 1:And so for the rest of us we might have to adapt a little bit more and say, okay, I don't get a chance and just say here's what I got, come find me because I don't have a bestselling podcast or number one selling audio. There's a lot of when you're at that level. But for the rest of us we got to go, okay, who's my audience and how do I tailor this message to meet them? And so for me it's saying, okay, I might have some of the similar stories which would be acting as the frame, but I might have a different tie down or lesson or moral at the end of that fits the audience. And so if I'm talking to a group of students, it's going to be a very different moral or lesson to the reason. I share that with you is fill in the blank If I'm talking to a group of executives.
Speaker 1:And so if I'm talking about leadership to a group of executives, a Vistage or a YPO. It's a very different conversation than it is if I'm talking to a group of sales in the same mortgage and real estate, which is very transactional, thinking how do I get the next deal? Ceos are thinking culture and future planning and bench strength and what's happening in innovation. Talk to somebody who's transactional, not thinking about bench strength. You're not thinking about what's happening in innovation. They go how do I close the thing? How do I get the next prospect? I need more leads, very different outcomes needed.
Speaker 2:And that's what we're working on with myself right now looking at the audience and having different plans of I don't know if this is the right term, but plans of attack to speak to the audience. It's incredible that there's so many stories that you're pulling out that now I'm resonating with yeah okay, I can have a tie down this way, etc. Again, I don't want to get into too much detail because we have a dinner to make, by the way, we have to shoot off to it. But before we kind of land this plan, so much has changed in the 30 years that you've been in this world and there's new speakers that are coming out that have their style. And let me ask you, what do you think about the new style of public speakers, keynote speakers now?
Speaker 1:I think you're going where I think you're going.
Speaker 2:You don't have any names.
Speaker 1:No, what I'd say is this there's different styles out there and I respect somebody who gets results, and there's a lot of great speakers that I've a very different style than I do much louder, and but I've also watched those same speakers that have a different style than me change people's lives and I've watched people stop drinking and do things that are just incredible and I think we need. The beauty of this environment is that we all have different tastes and we all have different things when what? My caution would be that there's a lot of aspirational appeal happening right now, people appealing to the insecure, the quick win, the big money and those things. And so if you're, if that's the approach, then I have a fundamental ethical, basic challenge with it, which is nothing of high value in this world comes quick, nothing. And you didn't build those biceps quickly. Now you can take a synth all and throw it in there, but then you look like a freaking alien. It's not, it doesn't. There's really no shortcut to the truly valuable, and when someone tells you that there is, there's a, I just say, caution now what I will tell you.
Speaker 1:I'm not saying that people can't give you a hack or cut off a couple years of learning, absolutely. When somebody says, hey, I can speed the process. That's the beauty of a coach, the beauty of having a mentor. I just hired a new mentor yesterday, my first meeting with him. Today we're going to dinner with him, dave Meltzer, and he's a friend. But man, this guy has so much knowledge that I'm like I can speed my learning by being a student again. It's. But I also know, if I don't act and work hard for the next five years on what he's saying to me, it's not going to be worth it. When I hired my social media person, I had a couple thousand followers. I had to restart my Instagram and I told him I'm not going to judge you for three years. He's three years. He goes. Everybody wants something overnight. I'm like I. That's not how it works. I'm two years into that and what do you want?
Speaker 2:tiktok right, a million right million on tiktok.
Speaker 1:We did that in the first nine months and our new instagram account because we had I had before I knew what was going on I had an agency that bought followers and so I think we were at 27,000. I think they bought 15 of it was at first. We wanted to get to past 10 because we wanted the swipe up feature and I didn't care about. I'm like, yeah, do whatever. It was like three grand or something like that, and then learning that's not a good thing to do. And so people are like, what are you gonna do? You got 27,000. I'm like I go I'm speaking to a wall. Nobody's there, right? Yeah, you see a number, but that's not real. And I go, I don't have any ego on this and what actually I had to fight my ego on it.
Speaker 1:To be honest, it was like, okay, I have to do this and I go. But you know what? What? If I didn't have any ego, I would just start over. And I went to the guy, mo, and I said you know what, either we're gonna have a great story to tell that we started over and it worked, or we're gonna realize that my content is bullshit. And either way, I'm gonna grow that's it.
Speaker 1:So let's start over. People thought I was crazy. We skyrocketed 200 over 200,000 followers in six months you know you're not trying to 212.
Speaker 2:212, that's a good number yeah, hey, go 212. Yeah, we're gonna get more frame after this show, which I want to mention. One more question and then we're gonna promote everything that you've got out there, because you have. You bring so much value. Even on your Instagram there's just so much free titbits that I've got all my friends that that are in so many different genres now to follow you. You can see all these blue ticks now I'm starting to follow you and they're all messaging me. And hey, is there a mastermind coming to Vegas?
Speaker 2:I was like oh, we're gonna do it now at the time I was like we might put something together. But everybody who's followed you, regardless what they're in, whether they're an athlete or whether they want to get into the public speaking, or whether they're somebody that's in the workplace all can take so much knowledge from your Instagram and and put it into the day to day. Obviously, you've got your book amplify, your mastermind amplify. You've got amp con. You've got so many different things out there. This is the platform that I want to leave you with before one last question, before the end of the plane. But please tell the viewers where can they find you, what's coming up, what you're excited about, and the floor is yours.
Speaker 1:Thank you one. Thank you very much. I appreciate that I the whole goal with Instagram and TikTok was to make it micro learning, and I wanted people to go there and say I can just binge, watch and learn everything that he says. And I wanted to give everything out there. And I mean, I suppose if you were to piece it all together, you'd have all my coursework, which is cool, but and if somebody was smart enough to do that, I'd probably hire him. I said okay, let's just do this together somebody's doing that right now, right I?
Speaker 1:hope they are man. It's a. It's an abundant world man. But to learn with Renee is Renee are you an? E1e learn learen, and that's on my Instagram and TikTok and my YouTube and saying it's basically everything. I think now, it's what my website is meet. Renee not me at. By the way, met Renee, I don't know where you get with me at.
Speaker 1:That's your only fans page exactly, but that's funny. I said that joke one time and one of my clients sent me an email. He goes I bought me at Renee, so you can just not forward it. I'm like, dude, that's so cool, thank you yeah, yeah so either way, you can find me there.
Speaker 1:But, yeah, we have our book amplifier your influence. We're number two wall street journal bestseller. Usa today bestseller top 20 books business books for 2022, which it really was. It was really cool. It was a surreal experience to see that the ideas were liked, so you put your stuff out there. Yeah, and people like it, so it means a lot. Of course, we have our amplify course. All the stuff's on the website meet Renee dot com, but the two-day course that we went through, so our mastermind is different than amplify please explain this, please so amplify is the one where you're learning how to be on stage.
Speaker 1:You're learning how to create your ethos and your storytelling and the neuroscience, and that's that one we do right now. We're doing it once a month, sometimes twice a month, and you can find that on on the website.
Speaker 1:Just click on amplify put the links below and the mastermind is more of an exclusive group. Those are people that are typically running a business, maybe a high level executive, top sales professional. It's a bigger investment on purpose because we want to make it a very exclusive group, but we meet three times a year koonage rooms yeah, it's really our next one.
Speaker 1:We have ben newman. If you don't know ben newman, go follow him. He's such a phenomenal. He's the number one mental toughness coach in the world. But he's gonna come in. He's gonna be 40 of us 30 to 40 of us in a room and he got ben for the day. It's just, it's so cool. The best friend is the anti-facil and at my life, so just tell you who. Yeah, clinton sparks, our boy was there last time and but yeah, so that's our mastermind and, of course, keynotes and everything. But you're gonna be. I've got a couple clients, by the way, that I think I can bring you with and I think you're gonna be. We're gonna do some stage time together oh, beautiful about that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'm. I'm honored that I've already had a lot of stage time with yourself ready, crafting this, this story of mine, together, and give him the opportunity, obviously you were the gift man. I'm gonna say you are, so we'll just mutually agree. Um, otherwise gonna go back and forth. But you truly seen something in me when we first met, long before we had in-depth conversation. Obviously there's so much shit on me out there too, but you and I met, just to give that story, at Keaton's event limitless we met at the gym at the that was the event, weekend and limitless which actually mark your calendars April 27 incredible event.
Speaker 2:Shout out to my boy, keaton again somebody who is doubted. Yeah, I probably put one of the best events on that I've been to all your own.
Speaker 2:Never seen a more stacked stage steve oakey, david gorgans, ed my lat, andy frazella, gary v the list goes on all on that same stage and that's what I met you, yeah, not at the event, but in the gym at that morning, and myself and Renee obviously I hear the name we got a train and, yeah, we just hit it off and then at the event, then we picked up where we left off. But, needless to say, from that moment on and with, obviously, the dialogue that's gone back and forth, you've truly seen something in me really encouraged me to just fucking go for it. Stop over thinking frax I don't know how many times you've told me so many these. Renee is full of nuggets. Right, you'll say something, and because it's so relatable and uses so many bodybuild analogies, I'm like fucker, I can't even fight you on this this is okay, yeah, but what about flax?
Speaker 2:you're telling me a story, you're telling me an analogy and I'm like I'm not going to win this, am I? I'm not going to win this, so I would just want to say thank you so much for everything that you've done, doing and soon to become. I truly have the best coach behind me. I had the best coach in bodybuilding and now I feel like, as long as I commit myself which I am to this process, turn up at all the amplifiers, the, the masterminds and everything that you've got of value, including an Instagram, and put it into my head and stop over thinking there's levels to this game and I'm going to level up tremendously and it's it's truly an honor and you are the easiest client to work with.
Speaker 1:And that's the when I, when Keaton told me he goes, you're going to meet flax, you're going to love him, everybody loves him, and Keaton is the mastermind behind that, that whole piece. So we love him. But for you, brother, you, you have done an iconic feat in this and now it's shifting that to a new application and I would say the message to anybody listening you don't have to be a flex lewis to be able to have massive input and impact. The stories that are most impactful that you tell are how you learn how to do a handstand. I mean, being on stage is great that we love that but then it's the lesson of just just almost cutting your arm off and being held on by a just a centimeter less less and then learning how to do a handstand and walk, and that story to me when you were talking about you would fall.
Speaker 1:But you caught a half a second and you like, and all you could think about was what would a second, three quarters of a second feel like? And you chase that three quarters, then you got it. What would a full second feel like? You chase it for weeks and what would a second half, what would two seconds and that one second of time. That's what we talk about one rep at a time. One rep.
Speaker 1:I think there's another book title there's another one though you said it earlier oh unseen, the unseen, and that might even be better. Oh man, I don't know but one of those. I think maybe that's your first book and your second book talking about the unseen work, the one rep at a time, powerful stuff since you pump, pop that chat.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean. Well, tell the audience, and I'm working on my book right now. Right, yes, you are surprised, but last parting question before you and I have to hit the road. Who is your mount rushmore of speakers?
Speaker 1:oh, wow, okay, hold on, all right, all right, all right. You have to put Tony Robbins on there. You got to, you got to respect. Then I'm going to put Benjamin Zander. He was the conductor for the Boston Hill Philharmonic, I think one of the greatest speakers. Let's see what I would put up there, and I'm not going to say current. I want to think all time, all the time, yeah, from a speech perspective, you got to have Martin Luther King. What a compelling story. 250,000 people showed up not to see him speak.
Speaker 1:They showed up because they believed what he was talking about and they showed up for themselves. That is not to see you, but your dream is also my dream. And when he died, that dream continued. That's the ultimate. It wasn't about him, and that's really cool. And then who would I give my last one? My mother, beautiful, yeah, amazing. That's the coolest question I've been asking a long time. And no disrespect to the eds, any other iconic speakers out there. They're going to go down on that same list. I'm just going back to people that previous to that, oh, what a beautiful way to end the show.
Speaker 2:Your mother is obviously living through you and touching the future speakers around stage, including myself, so for her to be on your mouth, rushmore, and for us to be chasing our first big stages, I just think that's the best way to end this show. My friend, I'm truly honored to have you. Yeah, I hope everybody at home has taken everything from this podcast and will be implemented into their lives and you will see a lot more with myself and Renee on many different stages in many different states, and I'm excited to showcase what I've learned from this great man and put it into you guys, the audience. So from me, renee, we are out.
